The present invention relates to a process for sealing doublewide manufactured homes and modular homes sections together and especially to a process of making a sealing material having a thick foamed polymer material wrapped with a flexible polymer material.
Manufactured homes are those in which a home or building is manufactured at a central location or factory where it can then be loaded onto a tractor-trailer and hauled to a purchaser's home site. At the home site, the manufactured home can be mounted onto a prepared foundation. Manufactured homes, in contrast to custom homes, have the advantages of mass production at one factory site where they can obtain the benefits of volume purchasing, more efficient assembly through standard jigs, fixtures, and machinery, and can have a more advanced engineering design. One of the problems with manufactured homes has been in making a home of a size and shape that can be hauled over a highway. This limits the width of the home and thus limited the homes to smaller elongated units. To overcome this limitation, double wide manufactured homes were developed which use a pair of manufactured home sections, each of which can be the same size as one manufactured home but without one wall so that doublewide manufactured home sections can be individually hauled to a home site where the two sections can be brought together and attached to form a manufactured home which does not have the customary elongated shape of a typical manufactured home. This allows for larger homes which can have additional design features to make the home look more like a custom home.
In recent years, doublewides have become increasingly popular but have also had various problems attached with them including the proper attachment of the doublewide sections together to form one unit which attachments must appear seamless and at the same time need to be well sealed from the exterior weather elements. Common doublewides today are attached together and are caulked around the perimeter of the attaching line or, alternatively, are shot with an expanding polymer caulk to seal the perimeter. One of the difficulties in sealing a pair of doublewides is that the seam around the attached sections tends to vary in width on the outside so that conventional caulk is not always satisfactory and expanding foam tends to weather and does not always give a weatherproof seal.
The present invention improves the sealing in doublewide manufactured homes along the perimeter of the attached sections which not only gives a good seal against the weathering elements but also will not deteriorate in the manner of other materials currently being used.
Prior art sealing strips for forming a variety of seals, but not seals for manufactured home doublewides, can be seen in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,084,348, to Hast, for a sealing strip which has a cylindrical shape having a resilient core of foamed plastic surrounded by a foil of PVC or polyethylene and an outer covering of textile fabric and in which the outer covering and the foil are attached together to form a flange which also has an adhesive strip attached thereto. The L. N. Williams et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,170,967, and R. A. Footner U.S. Pat. No. 3,413,389, each teach a method of making a sealing strip using a polyvinyl foam having a polyvinyl resin skin outer layer. In the Burkhalter U.S. Pat. No. 2,827,280, a resilient bumper is made of a cylindrical rubber resilient core having a tubular sheath closure and which are attached together with a grommet therebetween. These prior art seals are not suitable for use in sealing doublewide sections which requires a much thicker sealing strip with greater flexibility and with a more flexible cover in order to be able to give a seal with wide variations in the spacing between the doublewide sections at different points around the perimeter of the assembled doublewide home.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide a process of sealing doublewide manufactured home sections together with a selected sealing material custom formed for sealing doublewides which can be rapidly attached to one section of the doublewide before the doublewide sections are attached together. A polyurethane polymer of approximately 1.2 density is enclosed with a woven polypropylene which is attached with one edge folded over the other and sewn together to form the flange with one sewing strip giving greater strength to the flange.